The Five Red Herrings (Lord Peter Wimsey, #7)

by Dorothy L. Sayers

‘Want must be his master, as nurses said in the good old days before Montessori was heard of.

One of these days I shall write a book in which two men are seen to walk down a cul-de-sac, and there is a shot and one man is found murdered and the other runs away with a gun in his hand, and after twenty chapters stinking with red herrings, it turns out that the man with the gun did it after all.’

the good lady said about Hamlet – that it was all quotations.’ ‘G. K. Chesterton says,’ put in Wimsey, ‘that most people with a very well-defined style write at times what looks like bad parodies of themselves. He mentions Swinburne, for instance – that bit about “From the lilies and languors of virtue to the raptures and roses of vice.” I expect painters do the same. But of course I don’t know a thing about it.’